Is this lotus sitting fellow below with a chest full of tantric-looking swastikas a Viking yogi, a Viking Buddhist, or is he just high on mushrooms?

Years ago, during the hippie age, in my native Norway, I met the author Eivind Reinertsen, who claimed there were secret societies of yogis in Norway during the Viking era. After the hashish smoke had cleared, and I had replaced it with yoga asanas and meditation, I never gave his wild claim much thought. That is, until I discovered the so-called Buddha Bucket at the Viking museum in Oslo.

The bucket stems from the Oseberg ship, a large burial mound discovered in 1904 near Oseberg farm, Vestfold county, Norway. It is believed to be one of the best preserved and most exciting Viking ship finds.

One of the most interesting Oseberg discoveries is the so-called Buddha-bøtte or Buddha bucket. It is a pail with two identical figures forming the joints of the pail handle. Both figures represent a person seated in the lotus position.

With closed eyes the face has a meditative expression. The man’s breast is ornamented with red and yellow swastikas shaped in a fashion I have seen on temples in India.

A sixth century Buddha statue was found on an Island in Sweden, identified as an import from Asia. But the interesting thing about this Viking introvert is that he was made either in Ireland or Norway. He was not an import. He was a native. The composition of the metals, the metallurgy, reveals these curious clues.

So, was the late author Eivind Reinertsen right? Did medieval yogis roam the fjords of Norway? Or, like the Vikings often did, had he just taken one mushroom too many?

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About
Ramesh Bjonnes

Ramesh Bjonnes is the co-founder of the Prama Institute, a holistic retreat center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and the Director of the Prama Wellness Center, a retreat center specializing in detox by incorporating juice fasting, ayurveda, meditation and yoga to cleanse, relax and rejuvenate. Bjonnes is also a writer, yogi and workshop leader. He lived in India and Nepal in the 1980s learning directly from the traditional teachers of yoga and Tantra. He has taught workshops in many countries and is the author of Sacred Body, Sacred Spirit (InnerWorld) and Tantra: The Yoga of Love and Awakening (Hay House India). He lives and practices in an eco-village in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

Buddhist missionaries were present all over central Asia and in Asia minor. The Greeks knew about them, and so did the Egyptians. There was a port in the red sea with which south Indians were trading extensively, in spices etc.. All this is recorded history..

It is also known that Vikings were working as traders and soldiers in the Byzantium. In fact, the Varangian guard was the most feared and respected of all soldiers. It then becomes very likely that some of these soldiers have encountered a Buddhist / Yogic immigrants in Egypt or Asia minor. And they could have carried this flame further up north to Norway, where there could have been a small camp for meditation hippies.

MAURYA EMPIRE SHOWS HOW GREEKS WERE MARRYING WITH INDIANS AND TRADE WAS FLOURISHING BESIDES OTHER THINGS. I BELIEVE THIS IS WHY GREEKS AND INDIANS LOOK SIMILAR AND HAVE SOME TRADITIONS AND MUSIC WHICH IS CLOSE TO EACH OTHER

I was raised in Savo-Karjalan tradition in the New World. My fathers taught me that the ancient "Finns" and ancient Tibetans had common histories, though it was lost exactly what those were. But they taught me various things about those traditions, and about self-command and mental discipline…which I've come to conclude aligned or meshed with a root set of cultural practices that predated all agricultural civilizations and came from Forest/boreal and steppe people.

It becomes harder to imagine or explore these things as we are trapped in our language categories, as well as the critical/interpretive categories of "scholars" and the assertions of people out to make a buck.

However the nature of these pre-agricultural and pre-monotheistic beliefs (and the first monotheism was female, remember, and led to agriculture/bipolar gender disorder) can easily be seen in various traditions variously called "buddhism," "shamanism," "meditation," and even a-viking.

My fathers also suggested that there were strands of this old way of Knowing that was at its roots the same religion that the birds have. A direct connection to the river of life as it flows out of the North, and the tree of life rooted in the underworld. We humans owe our evolution to the sea, the sea cliffs, and the trees and plains, as the birds do, and the first myth in the Finno-Ugrian storycycles relates this (windwoman and seabird).

To go a-viking would be to continue a lifestyle that balanced rooted settlement with wandering. And eastern adepts got around, just as vikings did. Remember the "long hunt" of the "Finns," in which individuals would venture out hundreds of miles, alone, to hunt, fish, and trap. This way of being is much older than the hive that female monotheism inflicted on society, and the priestly/kingly/merchant tripartite war state that came later.